Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
NT is not a rewrite from Win16. NT is completely different OS from
Win16 and took *years* to provide the full API for Win16.
OK. Then your "rewrite" term doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
If they start over from scratch, it's not a rewrite, it's a new thing,
even if it fills the same product niche from the same company in a
compatible way. If they don't start over from scratch, it's not a
rewrite, but extended and mutated, no matter how much of the code base
is changed.
So yah, OK, nothing ever gets rewritten.
Your citations are not weakening my position that rewrites are an
extremely rare thing.
Oh, and the Phoenix BIOS is another example.
Yes, it's rare to take a huge system that's successful and rewrite it.
Depending on the scale of the rewrite, I think it's not that uncommon to
rewrite major parts.
You said you *never* saw a large app get rewritten, *ever*. You didn't
say it was rare. You said never. :-) Yet the computer you're sitting in
front of probably has every piece of code in it rewritten from scratch
due to business reasons rather than technical reasons. Universals like
"no software should ever get rewritten from scratch" or "it's never
appropriate to use proprietary infrastructure" are just bad advice, IMO.
If it works for you, then I'm happy for you, but I am not going to limit
myself that way. I've way too often been brought into projects where
rewriting the code from scratch to be structured, data driven, etc is
significantly faster than trying to add yet one more patch on top of the
existing code.
I'll grant you it's rare, because it's not often needed, especially with
a large and commercially-successful system already widely distributed.
I'd expect lots and lots of apps get rewritten (or certainly should) in
the early parts of development. The old "plan to throw the first one
away, because you will anyway" effect.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
His kernel fu is strong.
He studied at the Shao Linux Temple.
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